Gunnel Nyman
Gunnel Nyman is regarded today as a pioneer of modern glass design and as one of the figures who laid the foundation for the global recognition of Finnish glass art in the 1950s.
Her career lasted only about twenty years, cut short by her death at the age of thirty-nine, but it was a remarkably fruitful period. The work she produced in those years is now held in major international museum collections, including the British Museum and The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Biography
Nyman studied at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in Helsinki from 1928 to 1932 under Arttu Brummer (1891-1951), where she trained as a furniture designer rather than as a glass artist. Without formal training in the material, she began designing glassware for several leading Finnish glassworks, among them RiihimƤki, Karhula, Iittala and NuutajƤrvi. The work drew international attention quickly, earning awards at the Paris World Exhibition and at the Milan Triennials.
Contemporary accounts describe Nyman as warm and intellectually curious, cultivated and deeply committed to her work, yet modest in character. She found sincere joy in the act of creation and in the beauty her designs embodied.
Models and collaborations
Glass accounts for only part of Nyman's output. She designed furniture for Oy Boman Ab from 1937 onward and lighting for Taito Oy between 1932 and 1938 and for Idman from 1945, and to read her career through the glass alone is to overlook the breadth of her talent.
The Boman factory worked in a collaborative tradition that brought Nyman together with designers from across the region: Carl Malmsten and the textile artist Elsa Gullberg from Sweden, and the Finnish designers Arttu Brummer, Carin Bryggman and Jarl Eklund.